MONTREAL — Maria Santos Gorrostieta missed by a week The Economist’s announcement that the number of drug-cartel-related murders in her native Mexico had levelled off.

By Nov. 24, when the magazine published its story, headlined “A glimmer of hope,” Santos Gorrostieta was dead. She had been tortured and beaten to death — it’s assumed by drug traffickers — and her body left in a field in her home state of Michoacán, on Mexico’s west coast.

In one way, she was just one among the thousands of Mexicans murdered every year by the country’s notorious drug cartels. But in another, she was anything but an anonymous corpse left on the roadside.

Santos Gorrostieta was a beautiful, 36-year-old former mayor who had already survived two assassination attempts. She was a medical doctor and the mother of three children. Her first husband, José Sánchez Chávez, had served as mayor of Tiquicheo, a small town in Michoacán, before Santos Gorrostieta’s 2008-2011 term in office. Michoacán was not a safe place to be a politician. It was the first state that then president Felipe Calderón moved against when he declared war in 2006 on Mexico’s powerful drug traffickers, The Economist reported.

The first year of the “war,” Calderón sent 6,500 soldiers and federal police officers into the state. Whatever else they managed to do, they failed to protect Sánchez Chávez, who survived one assassination attempt in January 2009, but died in a second one in October of the same year. Santos Gorrostieta was injured in the attack in which her husband was killed, but not as badly as she was in January 2010 when a group of men with assault rifles targeted her.

She refused to step down as mayor, and almost exactly a year after the attack, stung by rumours that her injuries weren’t as serious as she made them out to be, Santos Gorrostieta made sure everyone in Mexico knew what it looked like when you’re shot. She posed for photographs showing the still angry-looking scars that crossed her arm and torso. A large, red colostomy protruded from her stomach.

“I wanted to show them my wounded, mutilated body, not out of revenge, but because it is the result of great misfortunes that have marked my life,” she said in a statement. Drug traffickers were said to have seen the photos as a slap in the face.

Asked why she didn’t take her children and leave the country, when many of her compatriots had done just that, she said she felt responsible for the people she once represented – “the children, the women, the elderly and the men who work themselves into the ground to make sure their children have something to eat.”

For Santos Gorrostieta to stay in Mexico and in office her entire term, from 2008 to 2011, was an extraordinarily brave decision. With her murder, there are now a total of four Michoacán mayors killed between 2008 and 2012, as well as three town receivers, a registrar and a secretary. Few elected officials were safe in Mexico at the height of the drug killings, but none seemed as vulnerable as those in the country’s smaller towns.

In the aftermath of her murder, state officials have had to scramble to explain what had happened to the around-the-clock police protection that she supposedly had since the 2010 attack. Fausto Vallejo, governor of Michoacán, told the Economista, a Mexican business publication, that there are simply not enough police officers to protect the state’s mayors. Currently, he said, only two mayors, both victims of attacks in the past few weeks, have police protection. Vallejo’s predecessor told local media that he had encouraged Santos Gorrostieta to no longer even visit the town where she had been mayor until 2011.

Maria Santos Gorrostieta is one of an estimated 60,000 Mexicans killed so far in the drug war. Her murder is somehow sadder because she was a woman and a mother, and it’s a little more unexpected, unfairly, that she would find the courage to stand up to the traffickers. But with so many tens of thousands of deaths, even the bravest among them seem to be lost. The tragedy is that Santos Gorrostieta may not, in death, serve as a model of courage, inspiring people to stand up for the right to freedom and safety. She may become instead a symbol of a country utterly incapable of protecting its own citizens. It’s not what she would have wanted.

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